blivet-gui announcement

[Vratislav Podzimek]

Good news, everyone! We (me and CC'd Vojtech Trefny) would like to
introduce you the next generation tool for storage management -- the
**blivet-gui** tool [1]_. It is a GUI tool based on the blivet python
library (originally Anaconda's storage management and configuration
tool) inspired by GParted and other storage management tools. Why not
use GParted you ask? The reason we came up with blivet-gui is that
none of the existing storage management tools supports all storage
technologies supported in modern Linux distributions. Anaconda does
support them all so it's only logical to take Anaconda's storage
backend, combine it with a nice, intuitive and in general
user-friendly frontend and build a standalone application for storage
management.

The GUI of blivet-gui is heavily based on GParted's UI to minimize the
surprise which is very important in such a critical task as storage
management is. If you know how to work with GParted, you'll almost
instantly know how to work with blivet-gui. All requested changes are
just enqueued first and then processed/committed to disk by the
"Apply" button just like in GParted. However, with blivet-gui those
actions may be something like the following sequence:

create 10GB partition sda1, create a LUKS device on top of it and use
the LUKS device as a PV for a VG called ``dataVG`` with a single LV
``data`` occupying half of the VG space and with XFS on top of the LV,

not only partitioning and file system operations like GParted does.

Having troubles writing partitioning part of a kickstart file for
automated installation? Run blivet-gui with the ``--kickstart`` option
and export the partitioning portion of a kickstart file instead of
committing changes to disk.

On top of the features described above, the blivet-gui is embedable so
any application using any toolkit with the XEmbed protocol support
(Gtk, Qt,...) may use blivet-gui as a part of its GUI.

The application only started its history few months ago, is under
heavy development now and will get new features in the next months
(RAID, BTRFS), but even now it is a very nice and useful tool.

Suggestions, feature requests, bug reports and of course PATCHES ARE
WELCOME! It is quite a simple Gtk application written in Python which
makes it an easy target for everybody who misses something in the
other storage management tools. Don't like Gtk? Text mode would be
really, really useful too! Don't feel like adding new features and
diving deep in blivet to implement them? The code always needs
refactorization and cleanup!

I think everybody can submit patches for blivet-gui and I'm really
looking forward to see the hundreds of patches from all those people
that hate every storage management GUIs and tools that have every
existed. Let's spend some time on pushing the Linux storage management
further instead of just complaining!

.. [1] http://blog.vojtechtrefny.cz/blivet-gui

P.S. Do you know about any other mailing lists or individuals that may
be interested in this announcement? Feel free to forward the message and
spread the word!

-- 
Vratislav Podzimek

Anaconda Rider | Red Hat, Inc. | Brno - Czech Republic